Messier 3

M3 is located about 12 degrees SW of Arcturus in the constellation Canes Venatici and is one of the brightest globular clusters containing about 500,000 stars. It is 1.1 arcmin in diameter and has an apparent magnitude of 6.2. It is visible with the naked eye under dark skies. It can be resolved with an 8 inch telescope. The cluster is about 8 billion years old, containing mostly old, red stars. However the cluster has many younger blue stars thought to have formed due to stellar interactions.

My Notes:I first found M3 by accident while scanning the sky one night in with my Mak Newt setup using a 20 mm eyepiece at a 50X magnification … the cluster was easily detected but looked fuzzy, decided to try my hand at one of my first images of DSO, the above image. The stars in the image are not pinpoint due to the fact that the North Star was not visible from my garden and so I performed a simple crude polar alignment…was amazed at the abilities of Astrotoaster to stack despite this fact and to process images on the fly.